The cubicle life

I've never worked in a big office before. The good news is that I have totally lucked out with my coworkers. But anyone can grate on your nerves when you’re proofreading something extremely long and dry and they’ve decided to have all their meetings at their desk that day. Or eat packets of crisps REALLY loudly. Or tap that pen until you want to rip it out of their hands and beat them with it (though I caught myself doing it yesterday while wondering how to define the word ‘exactly’ for people learning English without referring to even trickier words like ‘precisely’ and ‘accurate’ – you try it!). Even the friendly little ‘ding dong’ of Outlook inboxes receiving mail all day long can make me gnash my teeth.

I am also struggling to get used to feeling so visible. Strictly speaking, we’re allowed to use the internet for things like checking personal email accounts on our lunch hour, but my computer screen faces the office door of one of the big cheeses, so I can't bring myself to do anything other than work stuff. I almost hid under my desk to record my voicemail message, because I always redo them twenty-five times until I’m satisfied, and I’d never have lived THAT down if someone overheard. Anyway, like every job there are perks and quirks. On the whole I think I've landed on my feet.

We visited Stratford-upon-Avon last weekend, which is almost as exciting as Stratford, Ontario. Actually, to be honest I was pleasantly surprised by how lovely it was. I was expecting Disneyland-ish faux tudor cottages and screaming kids covered in ice cream. The tour guides, none of whom could have been a day under eighty, scandalized us with tales of Shakespeare’s frolics in London’s red light district and his sonnets to pretty young men. It was great.

Otherwise life hasn't been too exciting, though that's not necessarily a bad thing, I guess. We've discovered some nifty spots in town, such as a Victorian-era museum that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) took the real Alice to on rainy days. It feels like a curio cabinet of taxidermy, skeletons, and oddities brought back from the travels of colonial Englishmen. No twenty-first-century politically-correct editorializing in these exhibits. There are shrunken heads and critters that were pickled back in the 1700s, still floating in formaldehyde (which apparently needs to be topped up periodically - ick).



Tonight we walked around the Port Meadow after work. It has become my favorite part of Oxford. So easy on the eyes after a day staring at a computer screen.




(The bottom photo is from another day, when we got chased off the meadow by a hailstorm, which you can see in the background.)